How LifeSite can help with taxes

If you’re an eligible Haven Life customer, you’re already aware of the benefits that come with your affordable term life insurance policy — but you might not be aware of the additional benefits that come with Haven Life Plus, including no cost or discounted access to popular health, wellness and organizational tools.

This includes LifeSite, a secure online vault for storing, sharing and managing your family’s most important information. As an eligible Haven Term policyholder, you can access a LifeSite Plus subscription for you and up to five family members at no cost. That’s an $80 value — and a good reason to consider taking advantage of Haven Life Plus, a rider that comes with eligible Haven Term policies.

There are a lot of ways that LifeSite can help you streamline your organizational life — but because it’s tax season, we decided to focus on how LifeSite can help with taxes. We reached out to Chris Wong, CEO of LifeSite, to learn more about what this unique storage system has to offer — and how LifeSite can help you securely store and share all of the documents you need to get your taxes done on time.

How does LifeSite work?

What does LifeSite do — and how can it help you manage the documents, dates, data and passwords that make up a modern life? Wong sums it up in a single sentence: “LifeSite lets you store life’s most important information, all in one place.”

How is LifeSite different from other document storage systems? Simply put, LifeSite doesn’t just provide a safe, secure, shareable storage solution — it also tells you which documents to store.

“If you use Dropbox or Google Drive, you’re working with a file system that doesn’t tell you what’s important,” Wong explains. “Our system is structured. LifeSite’s taxes section lets users know which documents are important to save for taxes. Same goes for medical documents, or life insurance policies. We guide people in a structured way to keep track of what is important.”

Think of LifeSite as one of those pegboards that you often see in a well-organized kitchen or garage — the kind of pegboard where every tool is outlined in permanent marker or electrical tape, so you know exactly where to put your hammer or your whisk. This kind of organizational system also gives you the opportunity to quickly tell what’s missing at a glance; if you see a pair of scissors outlined on your pegboard, for example, you know that you need to find your scissors and put them away.

In this case, LifeSite will help you find, store and retrieve your W2 and 1099 forms, as well as your business receipts, your bank statements and any other documents you might need to quickly prepare your taxes.

LifeSite also helps you store, retrieve and share other important documents — such as your term life insurance policy. “There are about eight relevant fields that you’re going to use 90% of the time when you’re dealing with life insurance,” says Wong. “Your premium number, your beneficiaries, your policy dates, the policy itself — either as a copy or as a link — and the password to your Haven Life account. Those are the things that we store.”

If you’re worried about sharing your Haven Life password with LifeSite, you should know that the LifeSite team has built its own security system from the ground up. “We own specific patents that deal with data encryption, plus we use rotating encryption keys for the storage,” Wong told us. “LifeSite starts with security, privacy and confidence.”

How can you use LifeSite to help with tax prep?

Once you understand the power of LifeSite’s unique document storage system, it’s easy to see how you can use LifeSite to streamline your tax prep. “Taxes are really just document management and collaboration,” Wong explains — and LifeSite is designed to excel at both.

Start by using LifeSite to quickly identify and upload the documents you are most likely to need for the upcoming tax season. Whether you’re a small business owner dealing with profit and loss statements or a stay-at-home parent deciding whether to itemize your household’s deductions, LifeSite can help you collect, organize and store everything required to get the job done.

As you begin putting the relevant documents, links and passwords into place, you can also start sharing this information with others. “I have four kids, two of whom are in college,” Wong explains. “We share a lot of tax documents. My college-aged kids are doing their own taxes, but they still need my help; my younger kids are still on my taxes, so I need to keep track of their part-time job earnings and other key documents. Everyone in the family knows to put all of the important stuff into the LifeSite vault.”

LifeSite also allows Wong to quickly share relevant documents with CPAs, tax preparers and other financial professionals — but family, as the saying goes, comes first. “We use LifeSite for my own family group and then we use it to share out. We use it to collaborate with ourselves before we collaborate with external people.”

What if your tax preparer uses a different document tracking system? No problem. “I could invite my tax professional to my LifeSite,” says Wong. “I’d set them up as a collaborator, and they could pull everything directly from my LifeSite account instead of exchanging documents and sensitive financial information over email. But they have to have their own system, so I pull from my system and put it in their system electronically.”

Ultimately, LifeSite’s goal is to help you find what you need, when you need it. “If my tax guy says ‘These are the 20 things I need from you every year,’ then I can structure those 20 things in LifeSite,” Wong explains. From there, it’s simply a matter of getting the right documents to the right people.

What else can LifeSite help you do?

In addition to helping you organize tax information, LifeSite can also help you keep track of other important documents — such your last will and testament or your revocable living trust. If you have a small business, you could store your business succession plan on LifeSite. If you have kids, you could store everything from key health information (blood type, allergies, vaccination records, etc.) to scans of their recent artwork.

In fact, LifeSite’s mobile app lets you quickly snap a photo of anything you want to save — whether you’re keeping track of a COVID test result, capturing the receipt from a successful business lunch or taking a picture of the sand castle your family built before the tide washes it away.

LifeSite also lets you keep track of digital data that could be useful to your family in a worst-case scenario — not only your life insurance policy and your estate planning documents, but also the logins and passwords associated with everything from your bank account to your Facebook page.

“The sheer number of passwords each of us need to remember is overwhelming,” says Wong. “Scammers are on to people like us who use simple passwords like our kids’ names and birthdays. We have learned the hard way that it is simple and safe to use applications like the LifeSite digital wallet which make it easy for myself and our family to store, lookup and even share passwords for all the critical information systems in our life.”

In short, LifeSite gives you the tools you need to manage what matters — and a virtual pegboard on which to organize it all. That’s why Haven Life is giving Plus members no-cost access, and why you should consider using LifeSite not only for this year’s tax prep, but for anything you want to store securely and safely for years to come.